Riding the train between Los Angeles and Anaheim on New Year's Day 2014, I reflected (as I often do along that corridor) at the surreal landscape of "the between".

L.A. and Anaheim are both, in large measure, playgrounds as well as communities, known for dining and shopping and entertainment. But where do their materials and products come from? And where do they go when spent?

Much of what we consume or produce flows in--and then flows out--by rail. Many of the city's raw or finished materials arrive by, depart by, or are manufactured along the rail lines. And it is along these channels that the city's refuse is banished, its scraps, its offal, its depleted, unwanted, and unused.

The rail lines betwween Los Angeles and Anaheim are weirdly beautiful. They are lined with rail yards and factories and power plants. Oil derricks nod in hypnotic rhythms as they pump the dark gold many Angelenos have long forgotten, though it continues to flow deep underground.

There are flat yards of *things*, of *stuff*, dozens, sometimes hundreds of them. Armies of yellow school buses, herds of city trash trucks huddled like an armada of giant green armadillos, batallions of pallets, of flatbeds, of truck cabs, of oil drums, all aligned and stacked in fantastic arrangements like the blocks of a giant child.

There are lonely expanses under overpasses where L.A.'s mobsters might--might--quietly dump bodies which are then quietly recovered by the city's law enforcement ...

The Surfliner South promises sea views, and along its southern leg delivers them. But between L.A. and Anaheim the only view is of "the between," that inland industrial corridor where seemingly everything is made and mobilized and then destroyed.

In this sleek and airbrushed digital age, we forget to some degree the gritty and sooty forums in which things are wrought with sweat, with tremendous exertion. Traveling through "the between," a land ornamented with graffiti by the alienated, and the glimmer of broken glass, we are reminded with the force of a gut punch how things, even peoples, are made and mobilized and then cast aside ...To read all of Leslie's blog posts, visit her Goodreads blog: